Project Health

Last modified by Vincent Massol on 2024/11/04 13:38

This page lists various metrics related to the development of the XWiki project.

You can also browse the old Project Health page.

Metric Sites

There are several sites on the web analyzing the XWiki project and providing metrics:

Active Installs

We used to count downloads of XWiki but we stopped doing it for the following reasons:

  • It's not because XWiki is downloaded that it's installed or used.
  • There are various ways to install XWiki (on premise using the XAR, on premise using a Docker image from DockerHub, using XWiki SAS cloud, etc) which makes it impossible to get accurate download data.

Thus, we've switched to Active Installs, which is a way to get runtime information directly from XWiki instances. We can thus know how many instances were installed and how many are still used at a given point in time.

There are some limitations:

  • The feature can be turned off (please don't do that, it's anonmyous and helps us stay motivated to continue developing XWiki when we see our use base growing! This is an easy way for you to contribute something back to this open source project).
  • XWiki can be installed behind a firewall or proxy that prevents the Active Installs requests to be sent.

See the dedicated page for Active Installs to see the statistics.

As of October 2024, here are the Active Installs v2 (i.e. since XWiki 14.5):

activeinstalls2.png

Analysis:

  • Active installs (i.e. number of installs having sent more than one ping in the past 24 hours) are increasing (slowly but steadily).
  • Old active installs (Pre XWiki 14.5) can be seen on the old dashboard.

Forum Activity

We used to use Mailing Lists and we were following the number of messages posted but we switched to a Forum solution and are now following the statistics provided by the forum (Discourse) (requires Admin access).

Here's a screenshot containing statistics from October 2016 to October 2024:

discourse.png

Analysis:

  • Page views are increasing substantially since 2024.

Commit Activity

We use the commit stats provided by OpenHub since they aggregate the various source repositories we use, whereas it's hard to get this information from GitHub which only offers statistics repository by repository.

As of 29th of October 2024 (includes commons, rendering, platform and well-known contrib extensions):

openhub-commits-1.png

openhub-commits-2.png

Analysis:

  • Pretty stable across the years with a continuous substantial activity (300-700 monthly commits).

Source Contributors

We use the contributor stats provided by OpenHub since they aggregate the various source repositories we use, whereas it's hard to get this information from GitHub which only offers statistics repository by repository.

As of 29th of October 2024 (includes commons, rendering, platform and well-known contrib extensions):

openhub-contributors-1.png

openhub-contributors-2.png

Analysis:

  • For the full list of committers and their stats see also the Hall of Fame.
  • Seems the number of contributors has been steadily increasing till mid 2011 and from then on it's been pretty stable

Issues Activity

JIRA issues between 30-06-YYYY and 30-06-(YYYY+1):

Closed Issues per year

Source:

  • XWiki's JIRA
  • JQL example for 2012-06-30: resolution = Fixed AND resolved >= 2011-06-30 AND resolved <= 2012-06-30 AND type = Bug

Analysis:

  • Activity has been stable for the past few years. This needs to be correlated with the size of the team which has also remained relatively stable during the same period.
  • In the 5.x cycle (From December 2012 to December 2013) we've increased a lot the number of bugs fixed thanks to our BFD strategy (one per week during this period). In the 6.x cycle (Jan 2014 to Dec 2014) we've reduced this by doing other types of XWiki Days but still doing BFDs to keep bugs at bay.
  • The number of Bugs + Improvements + New Features is remaining stable across the last years. The number of tasks is increasing and this is mostly due to more frequent dependency upgrades (and possibly the rate of new versions of dependencies).

Bugs Killing

See also XWiki Days.

Number of bugs closed vs bugs created over the past 1600 days:

Source:

October 2024

bugs-october-2024.png

Analysis:

  • At some point we've stopped doing serious BFDs and the bugs have started to win again. We've started again to try to focus on BFDs but it's hard to invert the curve.
  • Also, since end of 2024, we've started to regularly do XWiki Days other than BFDs (one out of 3 XWiki Days is not a BFD).

July 2015

bugs-july-2015.png

Analysis:

  • BFD is working great so far, we're keeping up!

July 2014

bugs-july-2014.png

Analysis:

  • BFD is working great so far, we're keeping up!

l10n Activity

Since 2018 we've switched from using XWiki to using Weblate.

Weblate stats as of 30/10/2024:

weblate-202410.png

Analysis:

XWiki Releases

These stats are only for XWiki Standard (XWiki Enterprise in the past). They don't include contrib extension releases.

These stats from from the Release Plans.

Analysis:

  • Stable release cycle which means we're globally following strictly our release strategy at a rate of 2 releases per month (i.e. 24 per year).
  • Then we have bugfix releases for generally 2 branches (sometimes more). It's possible that we're increasing the number of bugfix releases, especially with our Security Policy that was introduced in November 2020.

Security Issues

JIRA issues between 30-06-YYYY and 30-06-(YYYY+1):

Source:

  • JIRA query examples:
    • Created: created >= "2018-06-30" and created < "2019-06-30" and labels = security
    • Closed: resolved >= "2018-06-30" and resolved < "2019-06-30" and labels = security and status = Closed

Analysis:

  • Big push on fixing security issues since 2021, with dedicated devs.
  • Security bug bounty (with Intigriti) at end of 2022.
  • We correlate created vs closed security issues as otherwise it doesn't mean much.
  • Note that there are various criticity levels in security issues and some are of minor importance while others can be important.

Contrib Repository Creation

Repo creations between 30-06-YYYY and 30-06-(YYYY+1):

Source:

Analysis:

  • Sustained activity over years (even though it was higher in the years 2012-2017).
  • As of now, there's a total of 375 repositories. We would need to check how many are active or dead.

Contributed Extensions

Number of extensions contributed on extensions.xwiki.org, excluding those done by the XWiki Dev Team.

Contributed extensions between 30-06-YYYY and 30-06-(YYYY+1):

Source:

Analysis:

  • Golden era was 2011-2016.
  • Less contributions after 2016 but still over 20 per year (i.e. more than 2 per month).
  • AS there are more and more extensions existing, the need to develop new ones is probably less.
  • As of 2024-10-30, there are 929 extensions in total (including those developed by the XWiki core Dev Team).

External Analysis

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